BT-owned ISP's traffic management policy fails to impress the ASA.

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Plusnet's traffic management policy has landed the ISP in hot water with the UK's ad regulator.

The Advertising Standards Authority ruled in favour of a complainant who successfully argued that Plusnet's claim that it offered a "totally unlimited" broadband service was misleading.

Use of the word "totally" in Plusnet's marketing blurb on its website was simply too strong an assertion, the ASA said. In the past, the ad watchdog has been lenient on the term "unlimited," as long as a telco applies only moderate limitations to traffic on its network, and that this has been made clear to the customer in a provider's ad campaign. BT-owned Plusnet failed to do this, however. The ASA explained:

We considered that the mandatory prioritisation that Plusnet applied, including set allocations that determined the minimum bandwidth dedicated to particular activities when demand was high, still constituted a provider-imposed limitation on a customer’s usage. Therefore, we considered that the traffic prioritisation policy Plusnet implemented was contrary to a customer’s understanding of a “totally unlimited” claim.

Plusnet attempted to dismiss the complaint by saying that each type of traffic on its network "was given a minimum allocation of bandwidth," and added that "no traffic was ever shut off." It noted, by way of example, that peer-to-peer traffic's minimum level was 5 percent of the available bandwidth.

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The ISP stressed to the ASA that traffic prioritisation did not lead to a customer's line connection speed being hobbled. However, the ad regulator said that Plusnet had failed to provide test data to back up its claims about the impact of its traffic management policy on its subscribers.

"While we considered that Plusnet’s traffic prioritisation policy was consistent with a service described as 'unlimited,' because we considered that the policy had not been adequately explained in the ad, and was contrary to consumers’ understanding of a service described as 'totally unlimited,' we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead," the ASA said.

Plusnet has been told that its ad must not appear again. The ISP can only use the "totally unlimited" tag in future if no provider-imposed restrictions are applied to its service, the regulator said. And—while use of the word "unlimited" in such ad campaigns is A-OK with the ASA—Plusnet must explain clearly to its subscribers what that marketing term means in the real world.